The Dutch Defense Ministry experienced a network failure, causing significant disruption across various sectors in the Netherlands. The issue was first detected on Tuesday evening and affected a military network that is also used by other parts of the government. The cause of the outage remains unspecified, with no confirmation of whether it was due to a cyberattack.
The Dutch National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) faced issues in sending out security alerts as a result of a problem with the data center. Eindhoven Airport, which serves both civilian and military purposes, had to ground all flights on Wednesday as a result of the network failure. Low-cost carriers Transavia and Ryanair were forced to cancel most of their flights, leading some passengers to take buses over 150km south to Brussels, Belgium.
Airport spokesperson Judith de Roy emphasized that there was no air traffic at all and very little information regarding the cause of the outage. The Dutch Coast Guard reported their phones and radios were not functioning properly. Similarly, Dutch national police, responsible for passport control at airports and seaports, stated their officers resorted to using cell phones and texting due to communication disruptions.
It remains unclear whether the major mobile telephone service outage with provider KPN was related to the issue at the Defense Ministry. In contrast, no problems were reported at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam or at hospitals, the Dutch tax administration, or the national emergency number (112) service.
Last month, an IT outage impacting an estimated 8.5 million systems running Microsoft Windows was triggered by a bad security update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The incident has been described as the largest in history, with most of these systems unable to restart properly for an entire day.